Wall Street is buying itself

Buying frenzy.
Reuters/Luke MacGregor
With the Federal Reserve's big test out of the way Wall Street is going on a huge buying binge.

That is, it is buying itself.

The Dodd-Frank stress tests, which measure whether financial institutions with more than $50 billion in US-based assets could survive a severe recession without infecting the rest of the economy, mandate that if a bank fails the firm is not allowed to return cash to shareholders in the form of dividend and buybacks.

Now that the tests are over, the banks that passed are rolling out their buyback plans for the year, and they're huge.